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If enterprise applications were made as hobby projects

I saw a post the other day about why enterprise software sucks and god knows I agree with it, most enterprise software sucks for the reasons Jarkko outlines, but one thing that came to my mind was that in the end… the developers don’t relate to the problem at all. (Among other things of course).

See, why do we get so many open source projects like mvc frameworks, libraries, functional languages, web servers, css frameworks? Each one claiming that it’s really a change in the way you code something and that you can do better and faster. (I’m not saying they’re not, that’s not the point, just that there are lots of them, which is very cool)

You don’t see the same amount of open source projects to help mechanical engineers or gardeners, why? Well, because we’re not mechanical engineers nor gardeners, plain simple. We’re software developers and the pains we understand the most are our own. That’s why we spend our free time creating these frameworks and libraries, each one with a more convenient API, better performance and easier to use (and hopefully better documentation) to solve our own problems and sometimes you solve the problems of other people as well, hence the open-source projects. And the community is very vibrant, almost every day on Hacker News I see some new project being announced (especially in Javascript, it seems Jeff Atwood was right after all – any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript)

If you create a home made application to manage your expenses, you do it so that it’s easy to use and quick! (you don’t want to waste an entire afternoon just to add a few expenses, right?). You give it a lot of thought on how to improve your life (be it a small gain or a bigger one) because you know what pains you and you know how to solve that problem. It may not be the most usable application for everyone but it is to you, and you are your client.

In an enterprise context, you have no fraking clue of the problems people face, because (obviously) you’re not them. A more realistic scenario is the project manager talks to someone who pays for the product and explains to the manager what the application needs to do… and we implement it, without the least amount of knowledge of how the application should really be and how the users will use them, worse than that, we don’t know how they would like to use it.

The problem is, you can’t expect non-technical people to know what their needs are. Well, let me explain better… these people know what their problem is, and they know that they want to solve it, the problem is the HOW part. And I believe it’s our responsibility to find out what they need in order to solve their problem.

The whole agile movement, with its short iterations, scrum meetings and scrum masters, stakeholders, etc… allows you to see there’s a problem earlier and fix it with less cost, but you don’t solve anything if you’re talking to wrong stakeholder.

That’s why, I believe, we need need developers to get out and see HOW people work, what their pain is, and then create something like it was your own hobby project where you do things to make your like easier, that’s what these people want as well, an application that helps them during their day job, not something to curse about. We need to sit by people’s side and learn how they perform their job, so that we can come up with good solutions!

I know that are a lot for issues with this approach, beginning with the fact that it goes against established procedures and although most of my experience is creating developers tools, I’ve been doing some side-projects that require just that, to know someone’s problem and help them solve it with a web application and it’s really been a fun ride. I must say that rapid prototyping really really helps out, because as soon as people start seeing things, they find out what they don’t want really quick and also being able to spend some time with them and understanding their issues is also really helpful, because you can see what they need (even when sometimes they don’t realize it themselves).